Cart-Abandonment Recovery — A Huge Opportunity

I just got back from the Internet Retailers Conference 2011, where Loren McDonald – Vice President of Industry Relations at Silverpop – did a great job of presenting some of the major results of his company’s recently released report: “2011 Top Retailers Study: Benchmarks, Trends and Tactics for Better Marketing.” One of the most important points centered around a key class of email marketing called cart-abandonment recovery. To be clear, this is one of the most vital types of emails, right behind welcome email series. I’ve highlighted a few main points below that you don’t want to miss. The bottom line is that if you have a shopping cart and aren’t doing cart recovery, you’re leaving real money on the table – likely a lot of money!

Check out the following stats:

• Between 60% and 70% of carts are abandoned
• Only 17% of the top 500 Internet retailers send cart-abandonment emails, and only 6% of the remaining retailers in the study send recovery emails – amazing!
• Of those retailers who sent messages, 75% of them sent only a single email, while 25% sent a multi-email series. Based on the Silverpop study, you can expect significantly better results from a campaign of three emails.
• An emerging best practice is not to offer an incentive in the first email in a cart-abandonment series, but to then follow up with increasingly aggressive incentives in the second and third emails.

Loren mentioned one company determined that cart-abandonment emails represent only 0.3% of all the emails they send, but those emails account for nearly 19% of revenue generated from all email campaigns. If that doesn’t get you doing recovery emails, I don’t know what will.

To implement cart-abandonment emails, you can easily integrate many email service provider (ESP) tools directly into a shopping cart using the ESP’s application programming interface (API). The cart-abandonment recovery emails are typically set up as a trigger campaign that encourages users to come back to complete their purchase. The easier you make the experience of coming back and purchasing, the more return you’ll see from your cart-abandonment email investment.

If you need help setting up such a cart-abandonment recovery campaign, just give FulcrumTech a call at 215-489-9336 or email us. We hate to see you lose out on such a fantastic opportunity!